HELP: I'm Spending More Time Managing My Social Networks Than Being Social On Them

Over the last few weeks, Facebook has been adding features to
sort your friends into groups like Close Friends, Acquaintances,
and other groups you can set up yourself, like Work Buddies and
Secret Crushes and Useful Idiots.

There's also a new Subscribe
button, which lets you follow people without requiring them
to follow you back -- like Twitter.

According to a new
post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will then figure out
which stories to put up top in your News Feed based on how close
you are to the person, and when you last looked at your Facebook
page.

All of this is an obvious response to Google+ Circles, which lets
Google users do the same kind of thing -- you can organize your
friends into different circles, then pick whose updates you want
to see, who you want to ignore, and so on.

Who has time for all this?

I just spent 30 minutes reorganizing my Facebook friends, and I'm
still not sure why. Will I really find Facebook any more useful
because my feed is rearranged in a different order?

Similarly, I spend almost as much time figuring out who to add to
Google+ and where to add them as I do actually reading posts.

That time is already scarce -- we've got Facebook for friends,
LinkedIn for professional contacts, Twitter for quick news hits
and witty commentary, Tumblr for
whatever people use Tumblr for, and Google+ because it's Google
and that little
red notification bug appears everywhere. Plus all the time we
spend using instant messaging, email, and other forms of
communication.

Facebook should resist going any farther down this path.

It's an entertainment platform, not a computing utility. Instead,
Facebook should focus whole-hog on adding cool new entertainment
features like music, which we'll hear more about
on Thursday.

But isn't it better to give people more control? Won't this help
Facebook keep the hardcore tech users who might otherwise defect
to Google?

Maybe.

But when people spend more time organizing their social networks
than being social with them, social networking is dead.